Gender Roles

The family in Lebanon, as elsewhere in the region, assigns different
roles to family members on the basis of gender. The superior status of
men in society and within the narrow confines of the nuclear family
transcends the barriers of sect or ethnicity. Lebanese family structure
is patriarchal. The centrality of the father figure stems from the role
of the family as an economic unit, in which the father is the property
owner and producer on whom the rest of the family depend. This notion
prevails even in rural regions of Lebanon where women participate in
peasant work. Although the inferior status of women is undoubtedly
legitimized by various religious texts, the oppression of women in Arab
society preceded the advent of Islam. The roles of women have
traditionally been restricted to those of mother and homemaker. However,
since the 1970s Arab societies have allowed women to play a more active
role socially and in the work force, basically as a result of the
manpower shortage caused by heavy migration of men to Persian Gulf
countries. In Lebanon the percentage of women in the labor force has
increased, although the Islamic religious revival that swept Lebanon in
the 1980s, reasserted traditional cultural values. As a consequence,
veils and abas (cloaks) have become more common among Muslim
women. Among Christians, the war enabled women to assume more
independent roles because of the absence of male family members involved
in the fighting.

Notwithstanding the persistence of traditional attitudes regarding
the role of women, Lebanese women enjoy equal civil rights and attend
institutions of higher education in large numbers (for example, women
constituted 41 percent of the student body at the American University of
Beirut in 1983). Although women have their own organizations, most exist
as subordinate branches of the political parties.